Tuesday, 19 September 2017

Some time ago, I had an interesting exchange with a french modernist composer, whose work had impressed me by its orchestral sonic brilliance, but which in the same time I found quite repulsive because of its aggression and aural ugliness, as if someone had tried his very best to find the most pulverizing sounds an orchestra could produce and then, organized it in a quasi narrative. I had met him once, before having heard any of his work, and his personality had struck me as sympathetic, mild, sophisticated, civilized and well-mannered, apparently an introvert, serious artist. All the more the surprise when I heard what he had wrought. I sent him a message asking him about his intentions, because I felt he was a gifted man but locked-up in some claustrophobic view of what music is, or had to be, and I wanted to know what kind of serious intention could be behind such self-refuting, intense efforts to bring something into the world which was so negative. I had expressed my doubts whether anybody with a musical sense would be interested to get to know such sonic art, and that such intentional ugliness did not particularly contribute to the world.

His last message was a strong defence of his aesthetics and intentions, which I reproduce here, together with my comments which were my answer. I find this particularly interesting because the man's explanations reflect so clearly a postwar modernist consensus, while he was much too young to have lived through the fifties and sixties, and was born in a non-European country which had not suffered through the Second World War. One would expect that someone like that would not quickly be sucked-in into postwar fashionable misery, but his education having taken place in Paris, he apparently had embraced the modernist gospel wholeheartedly. He was not a fool, and he is a well-known and respected composing member of the french new music establishment. It will be understandable that I won't mention his name, out of respect - he obviously is a genuine, and very talented man.

In France, modernism is still the established, heavily-subsidized form of 'new music', and the alternatives (Bacri, Connesson, Escaich, Beffa) are looked upon with horror.

My italics underneath were inserted in his last message and sent-back as a whole. And of course the exchange was in french.

Monday, 18 September 2017

At the 'New Musix Box', an American website showing material from some circles of young composers and students, a telling example was published which demonstrates what happens when young people, entirely unaware of music history and the indoctrination that postwar modernism has established in the educational circuit, sincerely try to exercise their intelligence on theorising the untheorisingable. The author of the article is obviously a sweet young woman, but also a victim of misdirected education.

Hannah
Schiller is a senior in the Bienen School of Music at Northwestern University.
Her research interests center around the current musical moment; she is
particularly drawn to post-genre concepts and music emerging from classically
trained musicians that is difficult to categorize.

This
article shows both endearing commitment to musical creativity and an
astonishing degree of muddled thinking:

Post-genre
thinking seeks to move away from objective judgment of music towards a
subjective reality, where the emphasis is no longer on whether a certain piece
fits/does not fit a pre-conceptualized genre “bin.” Instead, the emphasis is on
the individual intent of the composer.

Translated,
this reads: "Post-genre thinking liberates the mind from any critical
faculty, and restricts perception to the intentional fallacy" - the latter
being what the composer wants, without any consideration of the result. It is
very attractive: anything you compose, is OK. It further opens the door to
incompetence and nonsense.

It is worthwhile to stand still, for a moment, at the term 'post-genre'. It implies something that is left behind, is no longer 'relevant'. It is thus a useful term in a perspective defined by progressiveness: things develop to something else, and presumably into something better, so that we can leave the misunderstandings of an outdated past behind. To define something as 'post-', a value judgement is implied, which is again an implication of arriving at something better - why else would people bother to get at some post-position? If something is left behind it must be for something better, so: the very fact that something is newer, more recent, is already an indication of intrinsic quality. Where does this thinking come from? Clearly from science where it may have intrinsic value, but in the arts, such thinking is entirely useless since there is no progress in the arts. It is an ideal tool to cover-up nonsense and incompetence and ignorance - because 'it is new'.

The
concept of 'genre' is a tool to be used within a value framework: we
listen with different expectations to a piece of pop entertainment than to a Beethoven
symphony or an Arab maqam or Chinese opera, all these types of music require
different things to write and to perform and to understand as a listener. These
things are reception and value frameworks, results of long, carefully honed
traditions. Such framework is not something that restricts creativity either on
the side of the composer or the listener, but is the normal perception field
upon which the input is projected and then, processed. Removing such framework
and then trying to find 'a concrete theoretical framework' for material from
which frameworks have been removed, is nonsensical and will merely remove any
opportunity of quality assessment - however subjective that may be. It destroys
the meaning of choice, both on the side of the composer as on the side of the
performer and listener. The sound sample of Mazzoli in the article says it all: to material
stemming from traditional choral genres, quickly a rhythm box from the pop sphere is
added, as if this would enhance the listening experience. But it takes away any
goodwill to take the piece seriously: pop = entertainment from which we don't
expect serious expression, and such treatment merely works as inverted commas:
'I don't mean it, really'.Behind
such thinking lies the wider context of 20C modernism, where meaning and
intention of the production of new music is measured along a line of
development which holds articulation points where the music breaks-away from
established notions, transgressing boundaries all the time, in the pursuit of
freedom from conventions. But at every new stage of a vision of new music,
there is some notion of 'what is', which afterwards is considered a
'convention' and which thus has to be transgressed again, and so forth ad
infinitum. With creation this has nothing to do because it merely deals with
the outward wrapping paper, not with content and meaning. It is the inheritance
of romanticism which says that a work of art can only be good if it breaks with
a context. But all great works of art in the past were merely very personal
interpretations of existing contexts, a result of an attempt to create
something of value by the artist, and they never violated the basic frameworks
of genre. So it is with music, but the ghost of modernism has now entered
education, and - as this article amply shows - liberates young minds from the
requirements of understanding of what creativity means.From the perspective of such muddled, eroding romanticising, the Darmstadt 'work' which tried to transgress conventions in a rather drastic way, is entirely acceptable:

Friday, 15 September 2017

“[Many English names] are equally
historic, but fatally distorted by their heathen roots. One such name is
Scruton—Scrofa’s Tun —named from a Viking chieftain whose
distinguishing feature was not red hair but dandruff. The sound can be
rectified by no efforts of elocution. In whatever tone of voice, Scruton
sounds mean and censorious. Scourge, Scrooge, Scrotum, and Scrutiny all
tumble like black scarabs from the mouth that utters it. I am convinced
that the hostile reception encountered by even my most forgiving works
has been due, not to the conservative voice that speaks through them …,
but to the scraping steel of this scalpel-like surname. … And I am sure
that its subliminal effect is one cause of the enormous surprise that
people feel, on meeting me, to discover that I am approximately human.”

Tuesday, 5 September 2017

Is matter all there is in the universe? And, for that matter, what is matter? I found these two quotes by scientists who have thought deeply about the laws and forces which shape our physical reality:

'All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force. We must assume behind this force is the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.' Max Planck

'Anyone who becomes seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that there is a spirit manifest in the laws of the universe, a spirit vastly superior to that of man.' Albert Einstein

Since science has meanwhile revealed ever more unlikely properties of matter, the boundary between 'matter' and - ? something other? something beyond physical reality, another wave length? - has become rather blurred and ambiguous, as in the discovery that different particles (the smallest entities of matter) react to each other, appear to be somehow connected while this is physically, according to the law of causality, impossible:

'It thus appears that one particle of an entangled pair "knows" what
measurement has been performed on the other, and with what outcome, even
though there is no known means for such information to be communicated
between the particles, which at the time of measurement may be separated by arbitrarily large distances.'

There seems to be a relationship between such findings and C.G. Jung's proposal of synchronicity:

'Jung coined the word "synchronicity" to describe "temporally coincident occurrences of acausal events." In his book Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle, Jung wrote:

How are we to recognize acausal combinations of events, since it is
obviously impossible to examine all chance happenings for their
causality? The answer to this is that acausal events may be expected
most readily where, on closer reflection, a causal connection appears to
be inconceivable.'

Also one thinks of the hypothesis of 'morphic resonance' by Rupert Sheldrake, like Jung's a controversial and contested idea, but possibly these theories are some intelligent attempts to come to terms with aspects of reality which cannot be convincingly 'explained' by science exclusively informed and defined by material laws.

Saturday, 2 September 2017

Anybody interested in the causes of present-day cultural erosion, should take notice of what happened in academia in the last century, where the generations were formed who would enter society's cultural institutions and produced a climate of superficial, light-hearted contempt for the achievements of the past which were created with such great efforts and faith in the value of civilization. In the departments of 'cultural studies', a vague but intense smell of cynicism and incompetence drew numerous feeble minds towards 'culture', comparable with the enthusiasm with which flies are attracted to the dunghill.A good example is the career of literary historian Stephen Greenblatt, analysed in this interesting article:

Now, the 'New Criterion' has the odium of being 'conservative', but the premisses which are at the basis of the approach of the author, are not 'conservative' at all: that there is value and meaning in cultural products of the past which are still valuable in the present and will be so in the future, that there are distinctions between excellent, mediocre and flawed works, that critical assessment in the cultural sphere is functional because it helps understanding and clarification, and supports preservation of what is of crucial importance for our civilization and for humanity in general. All this is mere common sense and has no political or ideological meaning, it is too basic for that. But the many emancipation movements of the last century, which were rightly motivated by indignation about injustice, created - next to appropriate corrections in society - also a climate in which every cultural deed became suspect and every exploration of works an ideologically-charged undertaking, breaking-down the receptive framework of meaning, quality and context. In short, a misunderstood emancipatory movement wrought havock in the cultural field. Given the intellectual feebleness of the methods, it attracted many more students than ever before to the cultural studies departments, because the human pyramid of endowment gives more weight to the greater numbers at the bottom and thus, the financial advantages which play such a crucial role in a liberal, capitalist, egalitarian society could not easily be ignored by the educational system.

Sir Roger Scruton has already refuted this trend in a hilarious way in his 'Modern Culture' (Continuum, 1998, 2000, 2005, 2007; in chapter 12: 'The Devil's Work'). The above-mentioned article reflects a similar sharp and common-sense mind. If these authors are 'conservative', are they conservative because of preserving a common sense and analytical mind? Why would such characteristics be conservative? In times of erosion, preserving things which are of value is the most progressive attitude possible if progress means improvement. If anything deserves to be preserved, it is an analytical mind and common sense, increasingly rare goods in the context of rising tides of populism.